[lojban-beginners] Re: geodesic dome

On 10/26/07, Joel Shellman <jshellman@gmail.com> wrote:

> > Yes, but don't we do this sort of thing all the time:
> >
> > "So here on our right is a nice geodesic dome. The dome is blah blah.
> > When someone goes in the dome blah blah."
>
> In Lojban, insofar as this is done, we tend to more explicitly use
> anaphora (the generalized set of usages that in English are called
> "pronouns).

Which is the same thing so that's what I was referring to. This is
done in every language probably--it's not English specific. It's as
you say, the whole concept of pronouns and such.

> > So, the specific word is used initially to create context, and the
> > general term is then used after that since it's obvious what is being
> > referenced. And that initial "word" might be a whole phrase (as it is
> > in English).
>
> That can work in Lojban only so long as the shortening has the same
> place structure as the longer _expression_.  In general, that will NOT be
> true when the more specific word is a lujvo - to crib from your later
> example, the place structure for a single word meaning "motocross bike"
> will not generally be the same as the place structure for a word meaning
> "bike".  Likewise, all the different lujvo for the different flavors of
> geodesic dome might not have the same place structures, especially for
> someone trying to follow the jvojva rules (which don't really consider
> the phenomenon you are talking about).

Ah.... interesting. So what you're saying is that when you use a
"pronoun" (or whatever it is in lojban you were referring to earlier)
it ends up having the same place structure as its antecedent?

Okay, we're probably about to the point where someone (that being me)
needs to learn more lojban so we can save some bandwidth and your
valuable time.

> > Perhaps I'm thinking of someone creating a word on the fly... I'm
> > gathering that is unlikely, though, so probably not a useful point of
> > discussion.
>
> It depends on what sort of lojbanist you are.  At my level of skill, I
> coin words on the fly all the time, enough so that last week another
> experienced Lojbanist had to query me about several of my coinings that
> aren't in any dictionary (I don't use the dictionary much when I do
> Lojban either).

Excellent, I think that is wonderful and glad to hear that it will
work that way.

> We hope it will.  But there a several million different species of
> animal life, and there won't be a lujvo for all of them.  There are
> several thousand languages and associated cultures, and yet people
> complain about the several dozen that we chose to associate with gismu.

Okay, but all those things you mention are what I might call "proper
nouns" (though perhaps not technically such in English), and can be
handled in a certain way together I think.

> Some people are making Type IV fu'ivla,
> which are pure borrowings, and that is extremely tricky - there are only
> rules on what you CAN'T do, and they aren't easy to follow on-the-fly.
> I don't use Type IV fu'ivla and I do my best to ignore those that others
> have created.

Ack, ok, well, I'll definitely join you on that one. I think it's kind
of cool that Japanese uses a different set of symbols to write
borrowed words.

> Many other languages use compounding much more than English does.
> German is noted for its long words.  Russian productively uses a number
> of roots extremely productively.  The Amerind language Nootka often says
> an entire sentence in a single very long word.

Right, I've heard of such things and had been envisioning such a thing
during this conversation.

>  > If so... once could
> > consider that there is a "form" of the language (that which follows
> > those rules) that is completely computable from no more than the root
> > words (excluding fu'ivla which are inherently exceptions, so that's
> > ok).
>
> I don't think so.  It was not part of the design that lujvo be
> "computable" as to their semantics.  Decomposition was added to make
> them much more learnable

I'm assuming it was not consciously decided against computability (ie.
that computability would be a "bad thing"), but just that it was not
considered sufficiently important to restrict the language to it.

Okay... thanks again for your great patience and time. Not quite what
I was hoping, but... definitely interesting. I think it's past time
for me to buy the book so I can read it in the car and stuff...